


he who had a vision

by JadeLupine



Category: Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan
Genre: Angst, Blind Character, Disability, Fluff, Grief, M/M, Romance, Tragedy, allusions to sex
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-22
Updated: 2015-09-22
Packaged: 2018-04-22 23:16:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,075
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4854389
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JadeLupine/pseuds/JadeLupine
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>this time, the Commander loses more than merely his arm.</p>
            </blockquote>





	he who had a vision

**Author's Note:**

> ok here u go satisfy ur pain seeking hearts

This time, the Commander loses more than his arm.

“Stupid.” Levi spits to him. “You’re so stupid.”

“It makes no difference to the cause.” Erwin’s voice is water, stone, smooth. There is a bandage wrapped around his head, stained pink and brown, covering his eyes.

“Oh.” Levi mutters. He feels viciously childish. Sticks up his middle finger in front of Erwin. Ha. At least he couldn’t see this.

“What?” Erwin asks, sitting up straighter. “Did you nod, or something?”

Levi’s triumph cleaved away as if with a knife.

Humor is suddenly ugly.

-

Levi puts out the candles. Erwin sits up in bed, the bandages are now off. .A violent, horizontal scar scraped along his face, cutting through his eyes, which were now a sightless blue.

They forgot the Titans were men deep within.

Men knew how to hurt men. Where it hurt the most.

Erwin turns to Levi, a question on his mouth, sparse hair on his chest glinting. Levi pinches the final candle, the heat fluttering softly on the wick, clinging to his finger and thumb.

“I’m just putting out the candles.” He tells Erwin.

“Oh.” Erwin says, sensible. “I thought it was something like that.”

-

Erwin now feels as if he was constantly afraid. He does not let anyone know, of course. He issues orders and stands with his back straight and eyes sightless. But he _hates_ being afraid; fear sucks out control from him, slowly, like a child sucking a lukewarm sweet.

When can I be saved? Erwin asks himself, late at night as he dictated training formations to a soldier.

When will I be saved? He wonders, and sees only pitch.

He does not know what to do.

-

Levi feels like he has been kneeling for a long, long, long time. His knees are like calcified water and his hands tremble although there was no wind. Why, he whispers to himself, why does everything happen to his lover? Because the man chained in front of them captured by Eren Jaeger’s Titan, was Erwin’s father. Hange had gasped and Pixis had fallen back into a chair. They had known him.

Levi had not. But he knows the eyes, and the set of the mouth, and the strong arms.

And it is unfair, he tastes fire on his tongue, it is _unfair_ that the father gets to keep them while the son has lost it all.

-

“Who is this man?” Erwin asks authoritively, his back rod-straight, standing before his kneeling father. “Read out his credentials, Hange.”

Before Hange’s voice broke –

“Grisha.” Levi snapped. “The Beast Titan is… Grisha Jaeger.”

And his stare was ten times fiercer than usual, so the rest of them shut up.

-

“Can you help me up?” Erwin’s voice cuts into the stale morning. “Can you help dress me?”

Levi has been doing so for two months, but Erwin asks this every day.

“Come on.” Levi has not sworn in front of Erwin for days. He pulls up Erwin by his arm, helps him put on a white shirt. Button into the hole, button out of the hole. Straightens the collar. Erwin’s face is emotionless.

Erwin had always been so.

But not Levi, for him the tiniest sensation was an orchestra of emotion within him, the sheer vastness of the sadness. Tears rolled down his cheeks languorously as he brushes Erwin’s hair. He breathes in sharply.

“What is that?” Erwin asks, turning around, looking slightly to the left of Levi.

“Nothing.” Levi lies, and brushes his face into his shoulder. “A wasp startled me.”

-

The image Levi has always had of Erwin; what has remained so solid in his mind, oddly, is a man sitting on a straight chair, one hand flat on a book, hair falling over his intense eyes. He sets fire to this image, and finds that his head is throbbing with the pain of it.

“Levi, will you assist me in reading the documents here?” Erwin asks. “I need to sign it by tomorrow, and would like to decide.”

“No.” Levi’s head is bristling with heat and pain, he is _tired_ of what Erwin has brought upon himself. “No, Commander, I won’t.”

For a split-second, a half-second, Erwin looks hurt, but his face closes over.

“Erwin –“ Levi is immediately, immensely, impossibly sorry. Erwin’s face is closed, and he recalls how alive his face was, life-clinging, reaching forward, scrabbling within their world. A blind Erwin is far more unforgiving, he supposes. “Erwin, I-“

Erwin rises up, godlike, half shadowed.

“Did you think…” His voice is low and unbroken. “Did you think I _want_ this?”

He strides from the room, his forehead strikes the doorframe with a crack. It leaves a welt.

Levi convinces himself these tears on his face are from laughing at that.

-

“Sorry.” Levi whispers. “Sorry, sorry, sorry.”

Erwin turns around. He is not sleeping. His smile dawns, but it is a slow dawn.

“Have I ever, ever heard you say that?”

His laugh is a beautiful sound, something Levi has only ever heard nowadays in night-visions.

“You don’t…need… eyes… anyway.” Levi kisses soft skin, raised nipple, hair. “See? You feel my lips?”

A soft groan.

“You feel my tongue, hmm?”

“You can feel yourself, hmm? Inside me? Feel my teeth?”

“Can you feel how hot you make me?”

“Feel this?”

“Feel this, Erwin?”

A shuddering comedown, the salt and savor of cum on Levi’s lips.

He is forgiven.

-

Erwin feels like nothing, like nothing at all. Only something insignificant, only something gone, was once there then gone; here, he is caught in a lack of sight and an expanse of blackness. So many moments I have missed, Erwin thinks. So many. fleeting days and nights. So long since I have seen the curve of Levi’s pale jaw. No coherent image remains in his memories, it is no longer merely his eyes that are sightless.

Something creaks against the floorboards of his office and Erwin stands as if shot, his sword drawn in his left hand.

“Who’s there?” His voice rises and strains. “Who _is_ it? Do you not understand the importance of knocking, subordinate?”

There was nobody there.

More creaks.

Oh – Erwin thinks; he was talking to himself.

“The pity of it. Oh –“ he moans, face in his hands suddenly. Sword on the floor. A howl rises in him and he lets it come, lets it shudder through him.

“Pitiful… the… the pity of this, I have only wanted –“ His eyes could no longer shed tears, so his face remained dry as he wept into a white fist, choking and ugly like a child. “I have wanted so much to –“

Levi treads backwards quiet as a cat. He must not have seen this. He _will not_ have seen this.

But he can’t ever forget this.

-

Levi is thankful for blindness.

Now Erwin stands behind as the rest of them departs for expedition, his fist clenched firmly to his heart and his eyes stare solidly ahead at nothing in particular. They take their leave, and Erwin is still standing, standing, standing –

Now, for these weeks, Levi’s eyes are downcast. Who will run the shaving blade clean across Erwin’s cheek (he will miss the rasp)? Who will brush his hair to the left (he misses the silk and straigtness)? Who  will help him out of bed and into an ordinary life?

Levi, riding fast, in time with the horse, feels sick.

Seeing Erwin like that made him feel sick.

Please, he begs the whipping air around them.

Please, let me live.

-

Every time Erwin walks past a clock, he hears it ticking and ticking and ticking. He wants to step on them and grind them into dry dust and metallic parts. The clocks feel like metal drums on shelves, ritualistic, vulgar.

He imagines touching Levi again.

He reaches.

The wall he touches is hard as stone and cold as bone.

“Stop all the clocks”  he looks down. His father was a teacher, before he was killed (oh Erwin, if only you knew; your heart would - ).  He remembers poetry. “Cut off the telephone. Tell the dogs from barking with a juicy bone –“

He forgets the rest – something about machines in the past.

He knows he has not forgotten it by accident.

“He was…” He closes is eyes and racks his brain. Leans against the wall. Thinks about the Wall. “He was my North, my South….”

Strange seasons. Strange names for days? What are North and South? What tongue?

“My East, my West. My working week, and my Sunday rest.”

Sunday? He seems to forget, again.

He walks toward his desk, his arms outstretched, his aide waiting outside his office. Erwin tries to write, he doesn’t know if the quill has ink in it, he knows nothing. He smiles, and doesn’t feel sorry for himself. He is beyond pity. Tragedy is like a great hound. It is hiding things.

He cannot remember more of the poem.

But the poem still existed.

the stars are not wanted now. put out every one. pack away the moon and dismantle the sun. pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood; for nothing now can ever come to any good.

-

“Casualties?” Erwin inquires. “Mission statistics?”

“I’ll write it.” Levi vomits a smile onto his face, and then remembers. Oh. _Oh._ “Give it here.”

“I am still the Commander.” Erwin’s voice rose slightly. “I am supposed to know the figures. I am supposed to know everything. “

“Casualty rate, fifteen percent.” Levi drawls, and writes down _seventy two percent_.

“Titans killed, eighteen.” He writes – _none_.

Now his hand shivers.

(Why is he awake? Levi does not want to be awake if Erwin cannot see him.)

-

Is it lying if you’re doing it so your lover does not have to see?

-

Levi begs the world, begs the Gods.

-

Erwin has stood taking every slap the world has thrown at him.

-

“Do you sneak off with other cadets sometimes?” There was a rare grin in Erwin’s voice. “Do the deed with those who can see?”

“Shut the fuck up.” Levi mutters at him. Kisses trail lower and lower.

(Erwin wishes guiltily that Mike were here, to laugh at him and Levi, tell them what maudlin, sad old men they were being. To call them pretentious and preposterous. To joke about something blessedly absurd.

Oh, Erwin is so full of holes).

Kisses trail even lower.

-

“Hey, look what Nile lent us for a day.” Levi’s voice held traces of disgust in it as he dumped a squishy package in Erwin’s hands. “Look after it, Jaeger and his friends are sticky enough for me to handle.”

Erwin feels incredulously smooth skin, fat cheeks, and hands running across his sightless eyes. Oh, he thinks, oh a _baby­ – Nile’s youngest_.

He cannot believe there are still babies in this world.

Happiness?

He laughs then, and the child laughs even harder. It has undoubtedly found something utterly, indescribably amusing, and every time Erwin pulled it’s hands up and down, it went into peals of laughter. He child kept reaching for Erwin’s hair, his face, eyes.

Levi watches them – with a feeling of being in the wrong world, peering at the correct one through a screen. He presses a hand to his face and pretends he is laughing at the child.

-

Erwin turns to Levi at night and says – “Levi, Levi –“

His call is plaintive, and Levi thinks of dying animals.

“Yes.”

“I’m so tired.” His voice breaks, and Levi’s eyes open. Burn. “Oh, Sina – Levi, I’m missing… limbs, pieces… I see nothing… Levi –“

Erwin’s voice is thick and ungainly, ragged at the edges.

“I know.” Levi hisses. He hears quiet weeping and he does not know which one of them it is. “Oh, Erwin. Thank you –“

He breathes in through his teeth.

“Thank you for telling me.”

-

Erwin comes out of the shower, feeling his arm before him, touching the doorframe. He scrabbles for the razor, and shaves himself. He hums as he does it, sways slightly like a tide. Levi smiles.

What is this strange and beautiful creature that is his lover.

-

When Levi comes home the next time, he bashes through the door and falls into Erwin. He does not lie about the casualty, and Erwin does not react when he hears it. He kisses Levi, very firm and a little bit reckless.

“Oh –“ Levi grinned. “Welcome back, shithead.”

He hasn’t sworn in so long.

He can’t remember the last time he saw Erwin smile like that.

**Author's Note:**

> did u cry because same
> 
> pls leave kudos/comment i lov u
> 
> also u can go to my tumblr www.trashyeruri.tumblr.com if u want to read more turds or prompt something


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